We’ve all been there. You run into someone you used to work with and you’re not sure of the protocol. Say hello? Avoid eye contact and run? Give ’em a nod? Ask them to lunch?
“I was in Pearl Studios after an audition and ran into a director I’d worked with before,” explains actor Tim Murray about a re-enacted scene in the third and latest installment of his comedy series “Lanky Scoliosis.” “He was my boss, so we weren’t really friends, and I just made it so awkward. I’m pretty sure I hugged him, but it wasn’t an appropriate time because I just didn’t need to be hugging him. He tried to walk away and then I tried to walk away, but out of politeness we were both staying?”
After Murray realized that his (self-proclaimed) social ineptitude made for great comedy, he and his friend thought it deserved its own alter ego and coined the name Lanky Scoliosis. “It’s been sort of a joke for a long time,” says the Off-Broadway actor who is featured in “50 Shades! The Musical.” “Every time I would do something really socially awkward, I would say, ‘Lanky Scoliosis strikes again!’ ”
Murray is 6 feet, 3 inches tall with “the longest arms and legs in the world” and actually has scoliosis. But it wasn’t until a little over two years ago that he decided to model a character after himself and began jotting down all of his weird social interactions.
Once the series based on his experiences launched, Murray did all of his own editing and cast his friends. Having worked in theater, his cast includes the likes of Ben Fankhauser (“Newsies”), who wrote and recorded the intro song; Alanna Saunders, who played Tiger Lily in NBC’s “Peter Pan Live!”; and Jenna Leigh Green, the “Wicked” actor who got her big break as Libby on “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.” In one episode, Green plays a yoga teacher Lanky awkwardly tries to flirt with by explaining he has “the S-shaped kind” of scoliosis—“not the C-shaped kind.”
“I’ve always wanted to write for my friends,” Murray says. “There’s so much talent in [New York City] and not enough outlets for everyone you know, so there were no auditions, really. I wrote most of the roles with people in mind already. Chris Grace, who plays the Guinness World Records boss, was in ‘50 Shades! The Musical’ with me, and he’s such a comedic genius. I had it written already and I didn’t know who I was going to get for it, and I saw him and basically begged him [to do it].”
After focusing heavily on casting, Murray says that securing the technicalities of shooting a Web series was the biggest challenge. Aside from getting his friends to hold booms and help set up lights, he found a used camera on Craigslist and enlisted his brother John to help fine-tune the writing.
“Work it to death,” he says about the scriptwriting process. “Show it to your friends and have them comb through it with you. Get notes from people. Before you just put something up on the Internet, it helps to ask people whose opinions you respect. And everyone in New York has an opinion.”
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